Fun With Windows (TM)

[venta]

This morning my computer didn't start up, owing to not being able to find the hive mind.
Well, OK, hive file, but the message flashed past so fast I misread it first time.
45 mins later our sysdmin had it going again, but a bizarre selection of my software hasn't survived the experience (which was registry corruption).
Outlook is completely stuffed. Emacs, the application that usually prevails over everything, is completely stuffed - which is confusing me, as I wouldn't expect it to do much with the registry.
Winamp is fine, and is cheerfully still playing the list of mp3s I had running last night.

I just tried to install Xemacs instead, but failed to be able to run it properly. It kept complaining on start up that it couldn't find gnuserv. gnuserv is quite clearly installed on my machine, but I presume it's looking in the wrong place. Does anyone know (a) how to tell where it's looking and and (b) how to tell it to look somewhere different? I'm very fond of emacs as a thing to use, but I do find its setup and all its lispy business a bit of a mystery.

Currently resurrected old ordinary-emacs, and using that.

Oh, and after all the excitment of yesterday, I don't think it's hayfever after all. I think I've just got a cold.

Comments

[venta.livejournal.com]

And I shall experimentally split infinitives, too.

Did anyone else care about that except me ? No, thought not.

[uitlander]

Did anyone else care about that except me ?

I encourage you to boldly split where no woman has split before.

Apparently its now accepted english usage (according to my old supervisor). And he should know having removed hundreds of them from my thesis (with appropriate sarcasm).

[venta.livejournal.com]

Apparently its now accepted english usage

Not by me it's not :)

Well, mostly not. Some sentences sound so unwieldy if you unsplit the infinitive that it's just not worth it...

[zotz]

There's nothing wrong with splitting infinitives, if you do it with the usual concern for getting your point over in a natural and easily-understood manner.

Anyway, I wouldn't worry too much about the difficulty of Linux. If I manage it, it can't be that hard. Except, I'm told, on laptops, that tend to be full of poorly-documented trick hardware.

For laptops there is

[leathellin.livejournal.com]

http://www.linux-laptop.net/
But if the laptop venta is the one i'm thinking of it's probably too old to appear on this site!

[venta.livejournal.com]

getting your point over in a natural and easily-understood manner.


Yes... I'd have said that this rule should take precedence over all over pints of grammar.

However, I also like my sentences to sound nice, and I find the way split infinitives sound is often much less pleasant than if you'd moved the words around a bit.

(I know there's a typo in the above but I liked it, so I left it there)

[zotz]

I find the way split infinitives sound is often much less pleasant than if you'd moved the words around a bit.

In which case the other way is better for that sentence. I'm not against doing it in principle, but you're right in saying that it's very easy to overdo. That applies to a lot of things, of course.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Chillies, mostly.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

And toast.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Is it just a myth, or is it the case that the "no splitting infinitives" rule was invented at a time (the late 19th century) when it was a fairly common construction.

If so, then I'll restate the rule of thumb that I recently suggested to lanfykins - that when you invent a grammatical rule it should be descriptive rather than prescriptive, even if you later allow it to become prescriptive. Hence if there's "prior art" in this case, the rule is nonsensical and we're free to break it.

If you're looking for elegance, then speak a language in which infinitives don't arrive pre-split by the supplier :-)

[zotz]

Allegedly it was because you can't do it in Latin (because the infinitive's one word) and they wanted English grammar to be more like Latin. Hence, also, insisting on "It is I" rather than "It is me", although that one's been given up on completely as far as I can tell.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

I can believe that to some extent. English grammar is dramatically unlike Latin in various other ways, though, so it seems a bit pointless :-). The infinitive is also one word in French and German - in fact, for all I know we might be the only ones who even have an issue here, which might be a good enough reason not to want to split infinitives any further than absolutely necessary.

"It is I" rather than "It is me"

Does esse take the nominative case in Latin, then?